Scientists generally believe that people with a family history of alcoholism have a higher risk of becoming alcoholic themselves than those without a family history. Following on from previous research exploring the link between taste and preference for alcohol, Kranzler and team recruited 112 adults with no evidence of alcohol, drug or psychiatric disorders.

Forty five of the participants had alcoholic fathers. The participants were given a series of salty and sour solutions, and asked to rate each for how intense and how pleasant they perceived them to be. Those whose fathers were alcoholics found salty tastes less pleasurable, and sour tastes more intense, than those who fathers were not alcoholics.

Kranzler argued that there are at least two explanations for the findings. "First, these results could indicate that individuals with a family history, who are protected from alcoholism, possess unique taste characteristics which contribute to this protection. That is, decreased pleasantness of salt and increased perception of intensity of sour."

Alternatively, he suggests, certain groups of individuals with a paternal history of alcoholism may inherit genetic alterations in taste characteristics that put them at increased risk for alcoholism.

Commenting on the study, Professor John Whitfield of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney - who studies genetic factors in alcoholism - believes that that it is more likely that taste in some way linked to protective factors because most people with a family history predisposition would have already shown signs of alcoholism by age 18.

So does this mean that one day we might have a taste test to help identify alcoholism risk? Whitfield believes it's "a bit optimistic" since there was a significant overlap between the perceptions of taste in the two groups of study participants.

He also notes that the tastes used by the researchers were not representative of real life tastes - such as those of alcoholic beverages.